New XT BIOS - Looking for testers!

[andromeda92]

Does this bios work on an IBM 5155 with a NEC 20 CPU?

 

[640KB]

Does this bios work on an IBM 5155 with a NEC 20 CPU?

I see no reason why it wouldn't, and V20 CPU is definitely good. Either the 5160 or the V20 build should work just fine.

Let me know how it goes!

 

[640KB]

Very interesting! So there's a way to figure what each of the jumpers do.

The result (with the Everex card, and the CF card booting):
C:\DOS\DEBUG -i 61 4C -i 62 3F -i 63 3F

I can trace out the connections for you, but I'll be away from tinkering for at least a week. I'll get back to this when I find the time to take the board out

Okay, got it. This should fix the number of floppy drives on the software DIP switches and let you run a standard build of GLaBIOS. (let me know what the xx say though just to double check).

o 62 D

o 61 49
i 62
xx

o 61 4d
i 62
xx

Once that's done I'll DM you another test build which should read the virtual DIP switches and also includes a change that should fix the beeping PIT test issue.

Thanks for testing!

 

[chjmartin2]

All right everyone, GLaBIOS is now my daily driver BIOS in my Vendex Headstart Plus. Certainly, it took a bit to get there but OP persevered. The Headstart Plus is running at 9.54 MHz and had a few twists and turns. Anyway, the unique thing about this PC is that it used the Faraday FE2010A. I thought op would give up many, many times but he found a tech manual for a similar motherboard and then BOOM - all of the sudden the BIOS is working great. Originally I wanted a new BIOS because my BIOS wasn't compatible with my Breakthrough 286, but regardless I believe I bricked it.

The GLaBIOS is awesome for two reasons, 1 - you get a very cool Boot Screen that tells you features of your system and 2 - it boots FAST. The second reason is really my motivation for keeping it as my perm BIOS. The Vendex Headstart plus has an undocumented feature where it is compatible with 1.44 meg disk drives which was built into the original bios. 2X-BIOS enables the HD floppy just fine. Everything else works - been running it for a few days. I'm really happy with it and appreciate that OP stuck with it!

 

[powerlot]

Alright, found some time for testing:
I haven't had much luck with the build you sent me a while ago, as most of the time it doesn't want to inizialize the MDA card, and it still showed 4 FDDs but I'm not sure if it was intentional or not.
Here with the original BIOS and no XT-CF lite card in (SW1-1 and -4 are closed):

o 62 D
o 61 49
i 62
33

o 61 4d
i 62
0C

I noticed that sometimes it also reported Error 8H? 8 something... and then crashed (LOL @ the Disk boot fail message)

Looking forward to test the next version and thanks for your efforts. I also like the fast boot speed of the BIOS

 

[640KB]

Alright, found some time for testing:
I haven't had much luck with the build you sent me a while ago, as most of the time it doesn't want to inizialize the MDA card, and it still showed 4 FDDs but I'm not sure if it was intentional or not.
Here with the original BIOS and no XT-CF lite card in (SW1-1 and -4 are closed):



I noticed that sometimes it also reported Error 8H? 8 something... and then crashed (LOL @ the Disk boot fail message)

Looking forward to test the next version and thanks for your efforts. I also like the fast boot speed of the BIOS

Yes, the one I sent you was before the support for that chipset was completed so that would explain that!

The beta ROMs for the 0.2 version are up so you can grab it from GH. Go to Alternate Builds and get the FE2010A version:

Releases · 640-KB/GLaBIOS

A modern, scratch-built, open-source (GPLv3) alternative ROM BIOS for PC, XT, 8088 Clone or Turbo PCs. - 640-KB/GLaBIOS

github.com

The only thing is that it's set for 2 floppy drives so if you have 1 I'll DM you a testing build for that. That PC requires that drives are auto-detected on boot, which will be working in the final 0.2 version.

 

[powerlot]

Ok, apart from my CF card's boot sector saying goodbye I have the following results with 0.2.0b-VF:

FDD recognized are 1 which is correct and as additional improvement it also seemed to have correctly recognized the RAM in the machine (from 512KB to 640KB, socketed is 3x8+1 256KBit[=768KB?]).

Also, it seems to boot without issues now (no more black screen with the MDA card).

SW1-1..4 somehow influence if it wants to boot from floppy or not. I hope I'll get around removing the board and tracing out the jumpers in the near future.

EDIT: There's still a conflict somewhere:
- SW1 all closed: the beeping pattern from few posts ago
- SW1 only 1 closed: attached screen
- SW1 1 and 4 closed: it hangs at Booting C>C, then attempted to boot from A and hung up again. After half a minute, it conitnued booting the floppy.

Additionally, what's the difference with the startup beeps when it POSTs successfully? Sometimes it beeps shorter than the usual beep.

 

[640KB]

FDD recognized are 1 which is correct and as additional improvement it also seemed to have correctly recognized the RAM in the machine (from 512KB to 640KB, socketed is 3x8+1 256KBit[=768KB?]).

I believe that the upper memory between 640KB and 768KB is special and addressed for their proprietary RAM disk. @chjmartin2 had posted disk images for the Vendex Headstart Plus, though I'd suspect they would (mostly) work for your board too since they're both based on the FE2010A chip. I believe these have the RAM disk driver should you want to try it.

Also, it seems to boot without issues now (no more black screen with the MDA card).

Glad to hear that's working now!

SW1-1..4 somehow influence if it wants to boot from floppy or not. I hope I'll get around removing the board and tracing out the jumpers in the near future.

I looked around a bit for a manual for that board but so far haven't turned up anything. The Vendex FE2010A boards have jumpers to disable the integrated I/O so perhaps one of those is disabling the internal floppy disk controller? We did find someone who posted a picture of that board on a Discord and their jumper settings for SW1 was ON-ON-OFF-ON (pic attached). Don't know what it means but possible it's a working combination?

EDIT: There's still a conflict somewhere:
- SW1 all closed: the beeping pattern from few posts ago
- SW1 only 1 closed: attached screen
- SW1 1 and 4 closed: it hangs at Booting C>C, then attempted to boot from A and hung up again. After half a minute, it continued booting the floppy.

Interesting! Does it boot from floppy if you remove the XTIDE card?

Additionally, what's the difference with the startup beeps when it POSTs successfully? Sometimes it beeps shorter than the usual beep.

Here's the list of code meanings. Which one are you getting with the SW1 all closed?

https://github.com/640-KB/GLaBIOS/blob/main/src/GLABIOS.ASM#L1515

640KB

 

[640KB]

Maybe the failed PIT test could result in an on-screen POST error, which doesn't halt the boot process? If required / helpful I could dump the BIOS.

I probably meant to say "yes" to this. What kind of BIOS did it come with?

 

[powerlot]

Attached is the BIOS dump, the BIOS is labeled CD390. I'll report back tomorrow evening earliest with further results.

 

[powerlot]

I believe that the upper memory between 640KB and 768KB is special and addressed for their proprietary RAM disk. @chjmartin2 had posted disk images for the Vendex Headstart Plus, though I'd suspect they would (mostly) work for your board too

I'll try this later!

I looked around a bit for a manual for that board but so far haven't turned up anything. The Vendex FE2010A boards have jumpers to disable the integrated I/O so perhaps one of those is disabling the internal floppy disk controller? We did find someone who posted a picture of that board on a Discord and their jumper settings for SW1 was ON-ON-OFF-ON (pic attached). Don't know what it means but possible it's a working combination?

This causes a black screen and it boots from floppy when the CF adapter is out

Interesting! Does it boot from floppy if you remove the XTIDE card?

Yeah the behaviour with the CF adapter is a bit inconsistent, it does boot from floppy when removed

Here's the list of code meanings. Which one are you getting with the SW1 all closed?

https://github.com/640-KB/GLaBIOS/blob/main/src/GLABIOS.ASM#L1515

3 3 Error loading video adapter ROM

makes sense, since I had to mess with some of the settings when I tried using another video card other than MDA

Without the CF adapter, 0.2.0b VF:
SW1 ON ON OFF ON boots from floppy, but screen is black
SW1 ON OFF ON ON boots from floppy, but screen is black
SW1 ON OFF OFF ON boots from floppy
SW1 ON OFF OFF OFF causes disk boot fail
SW1 ON ON ON ON causes 3 3 Error loading video adapter ROM

Assumption is that SW1-2 and SW1-3 are for the video adapter settings?

I'll check out the BIOS build you sent me now if it makes a difference with the CF card.

 

[powerlot]

Hi @640KB, here's the pinout (best effort)

B-190 Jumper settings​	​	​
Jumper​	FE2010A pin​	FE2010 Datasheet description​	Detail​
SW1-1​	​ 9​	A64K​	Low = 64k / High 256k RAMs​
SW1-2​	12​	VID0​	see table below​
SW1-3​	13​	VID1​	see table below​
SW1-4​	16​	clock frequency XSEL on FE2010A​	micro_8088/Faraday-XT_Controller-FE2010A.md at master · skiselev/micro_8088 Micro 8088 - IBM XT Compatible Processor Board based on Faraday FE2010 chipset - micro_8088/Faraday-XT_Controller-FE2010A.md at master · skiselev/micro_8088 github.com
J2​	-​	-​	Pin 1 of U50 (SN74LS00N) and RP2 (resistor pack next to 8087 socket )​
J3-1-2​	77​	IRQ3​	Active High / J3-2 going to U44-3​
J3-2-3​	78​	IRQ4​	Active High / J3-2 going to U44-3​
J4​	15​	NREST​	External Reset​
J7​	?​	?​	Maybe adresses for COM/LPT?​
J8​	?​	?​	Maybe adresses for COM/LPT?​
J9​	-​	-​	Speaker​
J10​	-​	-​	RP9 next to U40 / FDD controller (double density, UM8272A)​
J11​	-​	-​	1: Pin 1 of BIOS U27 / 2: ISA A16 / 3: Pin 10 of U13 / 4: PIN 27 of BIOS U27​
J12​	-​	-​	Power LED​

Video settings:

 

[640KB]

Hey everyone. Just a quick update, the GLaBIOS project has made a lot of progress due to the huge help of many brave testers, bug-finders and experimenters, and has probably reached what might be considered "stable".

The latest version (0.2) has added some new features, such as support for non-"100% standard PC" chipsets such as TD3900A (Juko ST-12, etc), FE2010A (Vendex, Headstart Plus, PC-10, micro_8088, NuXT and others) and V40 (EMM Homebrew). There is also a new emulator version for "theoretically perfect" hardware -- so no DRAM refresh, I/O delays, motor settling or CGA snow (meaning it is really quick). Also, there's now full cassette support for 5150 builds.

Anyway, if you feel like giving it a whirl sometime, would welcome any feedback, ideas, suggestions or bug reports.

Link to ROM downloads:
https://github.com/640-KB/GLaBIOS/releases

Oh, and Happy #DOScember!

640KB

 

[mogwaay]

Amazing work! I've been using Serge Kise 8088 BIOS for my own project - Ive hacked it a lot to deal with the changes I made like DMA-less, PIO floppy like the PCjr. But I should take another look at this project as an alternative esp as you're now supporting a lot of other modern clones. I think this could be the go-to BIOS for a lot of these projects...

 

[640KB]

Amazing work! I've been using Serge Kise 8088 BIOS for my own project - Ive hacked it a lot to deal with the changes I made like DMA-less, PIO floppy like the PCjr. But I should take another look at this project as an alternative esp as you're now supporting a lot of other modern clones. I think this could be the go-to BIOS for a lot of these projects...

Thanks! Yes, have been working to support DMA-less/DMA-optional PCs such as Homebrew 8088 (though floppy support is DMA only right now). Do you have a working BIOS mod for PCjr that implements PIO floppy, and all of the required keyboard and video changes? Would be fascinated to see it. Let me know if I can help out!

640KB